Adams: Our prison system is the 'New Jim Crow'

Late last week, during a forum on the state of Illinois' prison system at Northwestern University's law school in Chicago, one speaker after another made the case that Gov. Pat Quinn's decision to suspend a controversial, so-called early-release prison program in 2009 was more of a mistake than the program itself.

Late last week, during a forum on the state of Illinois' prison system at Northwestern University's law school in Chicago, one speaker after another made the case that Gov. Pat Quinn's decision to suspend a controversial, so-called early-release prison program in 2009 was more of a mistake than the program itself.

MGT-Push, of course, became the governor's very own Willie Horton during the primary and general election seasons. After media reports about criminals serving as little as three weeks behind bars and worse, some of those criminals being arrested for committing horrific, violent crimes after they were released early, he suspended the Meritorious Good Time program and its cousin MGT-Push. Illinois Department of Corrections chief Michael Randle resigned right before the general election.

Many of the media stories were riddled with inaccuracies, according to one speaker, Malcolm Young, a Northwestern law school professor affiliated with the John Howard Association, which sponsored the forum. But, as should always be expected in such matters, the number of inmates in Illinois prisons started climbing. Again.

After several years of decline, the numbers went from 45,000 in October 2009 to an even more overcrowded 49,000 today. Young projected the numbers could reach 54,000 by the end of next year "unless something remarkable happens."

Meanwhile, another law school professor, Michelle Alexander, was in Peoria on Monday making a persuasive argument about the far more insidious reasons behind decades of rising incarceration rates across the nation.

In poor black communities, she said, the impact of massive incarceration, fueled mainly by the war on drugs, is a direct descendant of slavery. Yes, slavery.

Today, to be labeled a felon or ex-felon is to be locked into a permanent and inferior lower caste by law and custom, she said. Just as slavery, followed by decades of legalized segregation, stripped shamefully high numbers of colored and Negro men of basic democratic rights, the felon label strips obscenely high numbers of black and African-American men of equal rights to housing, employment, education, voting and jury duty.

"We use it to label people of color 'criminals', then we use the label to engage in all of the forms of discrimination we left behind," said Alexander, a former ACLU attorney and former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun who is married to a federal prosecutor. She surprised herself when she first began forming her conclusions a little more than a decage ago. But the more she researched, the more she became convinced that the nation's criminal justice system was more than an institution infected with racial biases.

It is, she said, "a different beast entirely, a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system analogous to Jim Crow."

A few hundred people, including elected officials and wanna-be elected officials, paid $20 a head to hear a law professor talk about her book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." The lecture was sponsored by Parker & Associates, which consists of newly elected Peoria County Board member Rachael Parker and her husband, General, a former mayoral candidate whose candidacy was hampered by felony convictions more than 20 years old.

Page 2 of 2 - In Chicago, Young called so-called release programs the "tax increase of prison reform." No politician wants to risk the blame for raising taxes or releasing inmates early.

Never mind deficits. Never mind the fact that the state is stone broke. Or that the average inmate costs the state - that's the taxpayer - $25,000 a year, up to $70,000 for the fast-growing elderly inmate population. Or that the majority of inmates are in prison for non-violent offenses. Or the huge body of evidence that shows cheaper, more effective alternatives can keep many of them out of prison or from returning over and over again.

Politicians, for the most part, are afraid to vote for the same criminal justice reforms because they're afraid of how voters will react. That, according to Alexander's work, makes us all co-conspirators in the rebirth of "The New Jim Crow."

Pam Adams is a columnist with the Journal Star. Her e-mail address is padams@pjstar.com.